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Effective social media reporting can make the difference between a successful social strategy and a dead-end communications effort that wastes time and money.
The right social media analytics tools can help your team generate hourly, weekly, and monthly reports packed with actionable analysis and insights to help guide your communications strategy.
Social media platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram have transformed the way we communicate and access information in real time.
Over the past two decades, businesses have gravitated towards multiple social media platforms to expand their outreach, grow their brands, and even engage in direct sales.
Understanding where your brand, service, or product fits within social platforms is crucial to creating future strategies.
And that's where social media reporting comes in. This guide will show you how to leverage social media metrics to get a better understanding of your industry. We'll look at the core components required in social media analytics reports and identify the relevant metrics to look out for.
We'll also point you to the top social media analytics tools available today that can help you get the most from your reports.
Before we look at social media reporting in detail, it's important to define what we're talking about.
Social media reporting is the process of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data from social media accounts. Usually, the focus is on your brand's social accounts, although you could run competitor analysis on other brands' profiles.
Once you've collected this data, you can generate reports that both assess your brand's existing strategy and help inform future decisions.
This analysis-first approach involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), which help you understand the effectiveness of your social media strategy.
Some common KPIs for social media reporting include:
Here's a little bit more about these metrics.
Engagement rate evaluates how well your audience interacts with your content. This could focus on how many views or clicks your posts get, or whether readers repost or leave comments.
Reach measures the total number of people who have been exposed to your content. Social platforms like X show a post's reach in all posts.
Conversions are the specific actions taken by users, such as clicking on a link or making a purchase. It can gauge how successful social posts are in gaining new followers.
There are further advanced metrics that we'll discuss later in this guide.
Social media reporting is essential for several reasons, mainly allowing you to:
Reporting is just one stage of your overall social media marketing strategy, where the goal is to achieve a desired return on investment (ROI).
But it's also one of the most important stages. Get the reporting wrong and all your efforts to collect social media data could be for nothing. That's why tools like Brandwatch allow you to create custom reports based on all the data you've collected.
Get it right and you'll have a clearer understanding of your performance, which makes it easier to allocate your resources – such as budget and time – more effectively.
A social media report is broken down into a number of sections that make it as easy as possible to understand all the data points. If you use reporting tools such as those available at Brandwatch, you'll be able to craft a document with the following structure:
Custom reports give you the flexibility to create documents according to your preferences and draw in information from across your social media data sources.
If you're a marketer or PR professional tasked with generating social media reports, then you'll likely be able to present the theory and conclusions as part of your overall strategy for your brand.
However, where many people struggle is identifying which social media metrics are relevant and which ones are not.
Here are the main metrics that you should consider including in any social media report:
Now, let's identify the relevant data that should be incorporated into your social media reports:
Professional social media reports need to present high volumes of complicated data in a clear, simple format. By doing this, you can share valuable insights across your team and other stakeholders before pushing ahead with fresh strategies.
Your report might be the thing that convinces your leadership team to allocate more budget to your social channels. It might also support an organization's wider marketing efforts.
It's important to get the right social media reporting platform, so you don't waste time and resources scrambling to produce reports.
Creating a social media report requires the right tools. There are many all-in-one platforms out there, where you can mine the social media for data before crunching the numbers and generating hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly reports.
Your tool should align with your specific needs and objectives. For example, you don't need a LinkedIn reporting tool if your brand has zero presence on LinkedIn.
Here are some factors to consider when choosing your tools:
Three of the leading social media reporting tools are:
Brandwatch: Listen in to social conversions across the industry, even those that aren't directly linked to your brand. Generate sentiment analysis reports to gauge where your brand sits within its industry and the broader social landscape. Brandwatch's all-in-one social media analytics tool allows you to generate instant reports.
Keyhole: Ideal for agencies, Keyhole helps you monitor your online presence and streamline your social media management at the same time. Create visually eye-catching reports that transform spreadsheets and tie it all in to your marketing strategy.
RivalIQ: Use this quick, free tool to measure your social media presence against your competition on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and X. Use RivalIQ's benchmark dashboards to generate quick reports and see where your competitors have stolen an edge over you.
Regardless of what social media reporting software you choose, it's important to make full use of the available features. Here are some guidelines to follow when utilizing these tools:
It's unlikely that you'll use a social media reporting tool just once. Your reporting activity will span years and perhaps cover a range of stakeholders.
So, it's important to create social media report templates that can be used again and again. This way you can more easily compare historical reports and ensure you're on the right track.
Here's how it's done:
You can create an effective social media report template using your chosen software. Being able to customize templates is important so you only keep the data you actually need.
Everyone from lone marketeers to marketing agencies need to ensure their reports correctly display information relevant to their marketing campaigns. Creating a comprehensive social media report requires you to stay on top of your game.
Here are some quick tips to help craft killer social media marketing analytics reports:
Social media reporting is, in a sense, all about looking at the performance of your social media efforts. However, successful performance on social platforms doesn't guarantee a successful report.
One of the most important aspects of social media reporting is to find the problems within your social activity, outline how to eradicate the problems, and track your path to success.
Here are two issues you may come across when analyzing social media performance:
Reporting on your social media efforts that leads to great engagement and triggers growth is one thing. But what happens when your posts are doing the opposite?
The value of a report is to understand engagement and follower growth rates, and what you're doing right and wrong.
These two factors give you a comprehensive understanding of your audience's interests and how they interact with your content. It's just as valuable to see what's wrong as what's right.
Monitor key metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and clicks associated with your posts. By tracking these numbers, you can identify trends and determine which types of content resonate with your audience.
It's great to report on rising engagement in line with trends. However, it's probably more important to spot problems in your engagement rate, and where you're missing out.
Followers on social media are a standard metric you can use to better understand your impact and influence online. Rapid growth can indicate successful campaigns, while sudden drops could signal issues with your content or posting strategy.
Growth rate is also just as important as size. You might, for example, publish a monthly social media report that shows followers on X doubling every 30 days. But what happens if that drops? Is that because people are not seeing your social media marketing efforts as much? Or perhaps you've begun to saturate the market?
Follower growth on any social media channel is difficult to get right because eventually, everyone hits a ceiling. That's why setting strong, realistic ROIs here is important for understanding the true success of growing your follower base.
Effectively tracking your social media performance goes beyond individual platforms.
It's essential to compare results across channels and over time to gain a comprehensive view of your overall performance.
Analyze your performance on different platforms to identify your most successful channels and understand how your audience engages differently across them. To do this, you'll need a tool like Brandwatch to oversee everything.
Otherwise, compiling a report with data pulled from TweetDeck, the Meta Business Suite, and Google Analytics could take days.
We spoke about monthly reporting above, and it's just as important to regularly compile quarterly reports. Here, you can assess your performance across longer time scales and ensure your content strategy aligns with your goals.
Break down your results by platform and compare your data to previous quarters to measure improvement.
If one platform is lagging behind the others, then you can easily spot this and address it by tweaking your marketing campaign. If you have invested most of your budget into another platform, and it's also failing, then perhaps it's time to rethink your strategy.
Spending time and resources obtaining social media data is, of course, important for guiding your current strategies. However, this data can also give social media teams a starting point when they strategize future campaigns.
Here's how you can use your existing data to improve your future output.
By closely analyzing social media reporting, you can identify trends and patterns that will help refine your overall marketing strategy.
For example, a paint company sells out of pine green after a successful social media marketing campaign. The company plans to re-run the campaign and order more stock, but its social media marketers realize people are also speaking about how pine green matches well with punch pink.
Rather than go all-in on marketing pine green again, the team decides to create a strategy that promotes punch pink alongside the most popular color.
By using social media data correctly, the team has found a new route to promote their products.
So, how does the team plan its new social media campaign? By using a tool like Brandwatch, you can compare existing campaigns and use the same template to create fresh ones.
This is the first step when planning a future campaign and is ideal for teams who need to act fast to stay on top of trends – such as a boost in interest for punch pink.
Social media reporting plays a vital role in designing and executing your new campaigns. To plan effectively, consider:
Remember, the reason you're creating reports about social media channels is to share them with other stakeholders. You might need to discuss issues with fellow team members or share a success story with a client. Perhaps you need to bargain with your leadership team for more funds to pay for a successful social media marketing strategy.
Here's what to do when it comes to reporting for different audiences:
When presenting reports to your social media marketing team, it's crucial to focus on audience demographics and the target audience.
This will give the team first-hand insight into who they need to target.
To communicate effectively, consider using tables and bullet points to display relevant data concisely. For example:
Highlight trends and insights within these demographics, such as the most engaged age group or the primary location of your audience.
Your marketing team can then get started on addressing the demographic issues you've flagged.
For client-focused reports, concentrate on demonstrating your client's social media performance. You need to be honest here. If a client's social presence is failing, then you can't hide behind the numbers. Explain why their brand is problematic and include in your report ideas for addressing these issues.
Use visuals like charts and graphs to showcase key metrics and progress toward goals.
Your clients will probably be interested in the following:
However, you can also show them information such as social listening data and sentiment analysis that goes beyond the basics. By digging into the details within your reports, it's possible to keep clients happy even if their social media campaigns aren't doing as well as you expected.
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